For what it’s worth: Patrick Roy said Alex Tanguay is feeling better, about a week after giving a somewhat dire prognosis about his health. Tanguay was at the rink getting treatment for his ailing hip, a condition he apparently developed after skating initially while rehabbing his knee.

Roy said he and the team still don’t want to give any timetable on a possible return, but at least there’s some good news there. I really think whether Tanguay comes back or not is going to be critical to any playoff hopes/success. If he can come back and Nathan MacKinnon can go back to a third-line role, that would just expand the Avs’ firepower so much. When you have all your real firepower on just two lines, it makes it so much easier for teams to play you for 60 minutes. But when there’s a guy like MacKinnon coming at you after Matt Duchene and Paul Stastny have already taken their shifts, it just becomes too much for teams to deal with consistently.

Other Avs news: Jan Hejda is back in the lineup tonight against the Wild. Nick Holden will be a healthy scratch, along with Brad Malone. Ryan Wilson also won’t play, as Roy said he wants him to get a couple more practices under his belt before getting back in a game.

Here’s Hejda:

Here’s Matt Duchene, on tonight’s “four-point game”, a term I hate, but oh well.

The Wild will be a “desperate” team tonight, and I expect a brutally tough game. They are 0-4-1 in the last five, are one point behind the Avs in the standings and the Avs still have FOUR games in hand on them – or “it”, as is the stupid grammatical way to refer to the singularly nicknamed team (the Avalanche is that way too, which is why I call them Avs as much as I can so I don’t have to write the incredibly awkward “it” in a sentence).

The Avs have come out flat a lot at home of late, so the first period will be critical. Colorado is 17-0-0 when “it” scores the first goal.